Doctor Who to Air Without Mid-Season Breaks in Seasons 8 & 9 Plus Capaldi Will Be a Darker Doctor-Excited?

That is a sentiment which has been echoed many times throughout the 50 year history (34 year history as an active TV show) of Doctor Who. In fact, the show itself once kind of referenced this sentiment in 1988 at the conclusion of its 25th season in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.” The plot involves an intergalactic circus, which one of the fans (an obvious stand-in for an obsessive Doctor Who fan) describes as not being as great as it used to be but he keeps coming back to it anyway. That fan? Killed off in the very next scene. Translation: suck it, you stupid fans! However, for the most part Doctor Who always manages to right the ship through a steady stream of turnover both in front of and behind the camera. Basically, as Barney Stinson might put it whenever Doctor Who starts becoming a not-awesome it stops and becomes awesome again (as if such a thing is just that easy).

Well, here we are again. We are fresh off of the show’s 50th anniversary, and while its popularity is ever on the rise in the United States its ratings are declining in the U.K. Just like the fan in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” some of us still love the show, sure, but we also recognize it’s not quite the same anymore. Steven Moffat managed to deliver his best when it mattered the most, giving us the astounding 50th Anniversary special “Day of the Doctor.” However, it seems as if since the end of the sixth season a creative malaise has crept in. In general, they have gone to the same dramatic well one too many times (e.g., one too many mysterious female characters for the Doctor to “solve”) while also attempting to cram far too much story into not nearly enough space.

Well, perk up, you bunch of negative nancies. According to Moffat (via Doctor Who magazine), Doctor Who is returning to uninterrupted 13-episode seasons for not just its upcoming 8th season but its 9th as well. This is the format the show utilized for the first 5 seasons since its 2005 reboot. Splitting the seasons in half, as they did with seasons 6 and 7, was more of a practical compromise to lessen the work-load, but many of the shortcomings of the 7th season came down to them trying to cram too much into standalone stories limited to around 40-45 minutes of screentime when the story clearly begged for a two-parter. A uninterrupted 13-episode run could conceivably help with that.

“It changes all the time, and it’s keeping ahead of the audience in a way. All shows age and they all age sort of in the same way. You learn how to do it, you get really slick at it, and then you think you’re really, really slick at it and everyone’s started to yawn. And you think ‘oh God, we’re really slick at this but everyone knows what we’re going to do’… So now we’ve got to actually get a bit raw at it and do it in a different direction. It happens on every show – you get good at it and ‘good at it’ is the enemy in the end.”

This informed his decision to cast Peter Capaldi to replace Matt Smith, an extreme change since Capaldi will be one of the oldest to ever play the role whereas Smith was the youngest. Moffat told Doctor Who Magazine:

“There would be little point in making as radical a change as we’ve made unless you’re going to go quite different with the Doctor. The last two Doctors have been brilliant, and have been your ‘good boyfriend’ Doctors. But the Doctor isn’t always like that. There is the sort of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston end of the spectrum, where he is mad and dangerous and difficult. If we’d cast Ben Whishaw, you’d know what we were doing. You’d think, ‘Well, that’s another quirky young man with entertaining hair!’ And he’d be a brilliant Doctor, but Clara would just think, ‘Okay, you’ve rearranged yourself a bit.’ I think it was time for the show to flip around a bit. The new version of the show is quite old now. It’s very old… We need the kick-up-the-arse Doctor, in a way, to frighten you and make you think, oh, it’s a different show again.”

It is interesting to see him mention Whishaw since he was indeed one of the many rumored candidates for the role, although Moffat has stated multiple times that all of the rumors were a bunch of bunk because the only person he wanted for the role was Peter Capaldi. The “Day of the Doctor” illustrated how similar the David Tennant and Matt Smith Doctors are, and many of the equally young rumored candidates for the role would have likely done something similar. So, perhaps it really is time for a change, and as Thick of It viewers know “mad” and “dangerous” and “difficult” fit Peter Capaldi like a glove. Granted, that could also describe Colin Baker’s ill-fated sixth Doctor, who was so unpopular they fired him after 2 seasons, but surely Capaldi’s career to this point has more than earned our trust.

Season 8 of Doctor Who began production earlier this week. It will continue filming into approximately August, and it is anticipated the new episodes will begin airing in August/September prior to a standard Christmas special on Christmas day. Season 9 will likely recreate that formula.

Until then, here’s Peter Capaldi’s brief scene from “The Time of the Doctor”:

Posted by Kelly Konda

Grew up obsessing over movies and TV shows. Worked in a video store. Minored in film at college because my college didn't offer a film major. Worked in academia for a while. Have been freelance writing and running this blog since 2013.

[…] Both the Doctor seemingly abandoning Clara and helping to kill the Faceless Man introduces a new degree of uncertainty into the show, which after the rather hit-and-miss season 7 is the right direction to go. As Steven Moffat told Doctor Who Magazine: […]